In underground mining, face conveyors having drive means attached to conveyor chains have been used for decades, in order to transport away material that has been extracted from the mined face using a mining machine, for example a shearer loader or a mining plow, and then drop the material onto a so-called roadway conveyor, which can include in particular a belt conveyor having circulating rubber belts.
For many purposes a chain scraper conveyor (armored face conveyor) may be used in such applications as a face conveyor, which is provided with superimposed channel sections, in which the conveyor chain having the connected scraper cross-bars circulates as the drive means. The upper channel section is called the “upper strand” and constitutes the material-transport strand, while the lower strand constitutes the return strand. The ends of the scrapers are usually guided on profiled side profiles of the channel element. A disadvantage of this design is that the excavated material from the mining machine must be transported to the upper material-transport strand, for which it has been proposed, e.g. in WO 03/091 541 A1, to attach a loading ramp to the mining-face-side sidewall of the channel element. The loading ramp is bent in its height direction.
Chain scraper conveyors are suitable in particular as face conveyors for mining facilities in longwall operations, in which face lengths of 100 to over 400 meters predominate and a wandering support, comprised of numerous roof support frames, is used. The roof supports (shield supports) stand adjacent to one another, in order to keep the working room behind a mining face open for the mining machines, and move either group-wise or in alternating advancement of the roof supports with the mining front as it is further eroded with each machine pass.
For special applications such as in shortwall mining, which is used for example for advancing the stable of machines (cf. DE 1 583 039), or when material should be conveyed (transported) with both strands (DE 914 478), it is known to arrange the two strands not over one another, but rather substantially adjacent to one another.
A slat conveyor has already been proposed in DE Patent No. 914 478 for very special applications, in which trough-like, partially overlapping plates having lateral upturned edges are moved in a circulating manner using a conveyor chain. In this embodiment, the plates themselves move on guide rollers on both sides of channel elements. The channel elements forming the material-transport strand and the channel elements forming the return strand can be disposed either adjacent to one another to achieve a particularly low conveyor height, or one over the other. The plates are situated obliquely at an unloading point, so that the material can slide off from the top side of the transport plate over an open end between the upturned edges. At the unloading station and at the opposite return station the carrier plates that form the transport plates must be swiveled (pivoted) out to the side in a relatively complex manner with respect to the conveyor chain and then situated obliquely. The slat conveyor only functions if the conveyor belt is moved by a sufficient height in the delivery area, where the channels guiding the support plates are raised using lifting supports.
The present disclosure is directed, at least in part, to improving or overcoming one or more aspects of prior systems.